Text to Voice converter?

Hi all!

I’m looking for a software that I can use to convert text to a human male and female voice and then save it to an audio file.

I was searching online and did find many converter. But they are not clear regarding that if I can use the audio files for commercial purposes or not.

I was also looking in to Text to Speech API but could not get it to work on Android and also some words I’ve been using was not done right by the API. So I’m looking in to the option to use audio files instead, but can’t find any good solution that would save the voice in to an audio file and grant me permission to use it for commercial purposes.

Could anyone recommend any software that I can definitely use for commercial purposes?

I would appreciate any help.

Thanks.

I did get this link on an other forum
acapela-box.com

It is not free, but really good and not too expensive. The best part we can listen to any text for free and need to pay only if we want to download and we are paying for each character. You get 700+ points for 6 euros which is worth 700+ character with a normal voice or 350+ with a premium voice. Once you know exactly what sort of voice you need which is free to try, it is plenty and very cheap in my opinion. Other services charge you a monthly fee even to just listen to a text.

Also, remember for the money the sound files can be used for commercial purposes, free services out there don’t give you permission to use the sound files for commercial purposes.

Here is an other one that is free called Balabolka:
cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

It is free and works offline, but windows only and at the moment I’m not sure if the actual voices is ok to use for commercial purposes. The software is using the sstem voices on Windows which is free to use in Windows apps, but in case you would be using them say in an Android app, not sure if that would be ok.
But it is definably very useful for free and Windows only games and for making placeholders.

Nice tools :slight_smile:

Personaly i use some free vst vocoders and vst various effect on my own voice.

I used STATE for a few tracks that I made.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_normal
There was a project called STATE Forever to offer legacy support,
but I can’t find it on the interweb.

It got bought and sold a few times and is no longer a viable option.
xtranormal.com/

We even made a video clip for Magos Hip Hop Song.
youtube.com/watch?v=sDFBb4SpFrw
(Worth reading the Ultimate Dad Joke comment for the backstory)

DNA
youtu.be/4QBGFURYvg8

Older Apple operating systems also had this built in.
osxdaily.com/2010/03/28/how-to-m … to-speech/
I used to use it with VoiceBox to export as an aiff.
macupdate.com/app/mac/10019/voice-box
macworld.com/article/1008082/voicebox.html
hehe that last article is from 2002.
Not sure if it is in current macos though.

There are also some vst’s that you can plug into audio software.
plogue.com/products/chipspeech.html
kvraudio.com/product/vst-speek-by-wavosaur

Adobe have of course been working on this as well.
helpx.adobe.com/audition/using/ … eeech.html

MobileNoob
akaFTR

Thanks but I need something that still exist today as I can’t travel back in time (I wish I could, could fix so many things…)

My problem with using system voices either on Mac or Windows is that I’m afraid of that in case I’m using the voice on a different system it may go against the Terms of Use. But thanks for mentioning.

I thought of this but I don’t have a good mic, so the quality would be trash and also my accent is not so great either, it a mix of English, Welsh, American and Australian :smiling_imp:
With a Text of Voice converter, I can choose the accent and even the gender and in some case even the age :slight_smile:

Hey DD,
what software for speech synthesis did you end up going for ?

I just remembered vocaloid as well:
vocaloid.com/en/

MobileNoob

I’m using Balabolka for placeholder voices right now. I haven’t decided yet what am I going to use for the final release. Fortunately I’m totally fine with machine voice, it doesn’t need to be life like at all and I was also considering to release the game for Windows only and then I could stick with Balabolka with confident. I’m going to make the decision when the game is done and I’m about to release it. Quality of the voice from technical point of view would be important though, I don’t want any noises, it needs to be crystal clear.

This is very impressive. I might look in to it when the time comes. I couldn’t find a demo though, would be nice if I could try it and play around with the settings and see how difficult would it be to create normal speech voices, I don’t really need singers in this project but it is definitely produce great quality voices. Thanks for mentioning.

Hey DD,
found this. It may help with your pc release at least.
kanae.net/secondlife/idobata_en.html

MobileNoob

Thank you for the link but it doesn’t seem to export audio file, it is meant to be used with chat applications. It is also using the same Microsoft API that Balabolka. I would like to target mobiles in the first place actually, and I’m uncertain but I believe the voice generated by Microsoft API can be used only on Windows. If I would be making this game for Windows only then Balabolka would be ok I think but at the moment I plan to make this cross platform and I’m looking for something that is using a none platform specific API to generate the voice.

But thanks, I appreciate the link though :slight_smile:

I found NewscasterVocalizer software is more realistic while delivering text to speech. I have been using this from the last 2 years now and it never disappointed me in the quality of audio it delivers.

Basically, it uses Neural AI technology to deliver natural voice over scripts. Due to neural technology, it not only delivers massive improvements in speech quality but it increases naturalness and expressiveness which are the two key factors in creating a lifelike speech that is getting closer than ever to human voices.

If we talk about different styles of talking. The Human ear can tell the difference between a newscast, a sportscast, a narration, and so on. The software provides more than 65 + voice style, which is very helpful.

But this software adopts the right style of speech for the right context, which is critical to getting their message across.

One of the key features I found about in this software is that it supports many languages. So you can also produce multiple language content for maximizing your traffic and views.

Software is super easy to use as well

  1. Select a language and voice you want to use

  2. Paste your text

  3. Click the create button

these 3 steps will create your next amazing voice-over in seconds.

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Sounds interesting. Thanks :+1:

Thanks but as I mentioned I prefer not to use system voices because I am uncertain about how legal is it to use those voices in commercial projects on different systems.

Also the captcha at originaldll.com keeps telling me I enter the wrong number so I can not download the tool and GitHub doesn’t provide a binary but only the source without any instructions how to build it.

1 Like

Thanks I’ve been using Balabolka it was ok for the most part but since I switched to a Mac and I needed something that both cross-platform and also offer more free voice engines to choose from.

Currently I am using freeTTS:
https://freetts.com

It is the best I’ve found so far. It is offer a desktop app for both Mac and Windows and access to many free voice engines including MS, Google and Amazon and many languages. We can also tweak the voices and apply different effects and export to MP3.

It has multiple plans to choose from:

  • Free for 8000 characters/week, it is not many to get a proper work done but enough to experiment with the voices for free and once you know exactly what voices you want, you can pay for more characters and actually it could be just enough to complete a small project.

  • $6 for 1mill characters/day, it is very expensive if you can not use all 1 mill characters within 24 hours but in case it is suit you, you can get lot of work done for just $6-$18

  • $19 for 2mill characters/month it is more reasonable if you need 1 time only to complete a work but too expensive if you need access for longer than 1 month or need more characters.

  • $99 for 10 mill characters/year, is more reasonable if you looking for something long term, it is basically just $8 for 800k+ characters/month or $0.28 for 28k characters/day which is actually not too bad if you need lots of characters long term.

Depends on which premium voices you choose, Acapela box for approx $99 gives you only 7.5mill characters while freeTTS gives you 10mill for the same money and personally I find the Amazon voice engine in freeTTS the best quality among any others I tried for getting a clean speech voice and pronunciation of every single word.

I have one idea that can help you. I usually use audio to text converter. This tool is my favorite, because it has some additional features, including manual and automatic transcription, an in-build editor and different price options.

Thanks, unfortunately I was looking for text to audio and not audio to text conversion but hey, it is cool I’m going to save this maybe come handy one day :+1: